It Was Always 3AM For John
by Pinnacle of Madness
Summary: When you start out your day on the floor covered in the insides of some creature you've never seen before and desperately hope to never see again, you know it's going to be a bad day.


A/N: Cross-posted to tumblr and AO3. Based on the following tumblr post by dannythequeerghost:

"_I don't ship Dave/John but I have the craziest image of them kissing after some kind of hellish scenario and David being all 'wtf' and John saying 'there werent any chicks around' and never talking about it again_"

The pacing and tenses in this are crap, but I wanted to get it out. So here, have some platonic smooches.

* * *

_Fuck this. Fuck this like the desperate man with weird kinks and six hundred bucks to spare. Fuck this so hard._

I groaned, squirming slightly at the feeling of liquids I'd rather not consider the origins of seeped into my hair. My night had started out so mediocre. I mean, I was asleep when it began a couple hours ago, so actually it started out pretty good. Of course, a peaceful sleep at ten meant that there was no way something wouldn't happen to ruin it, because the universe is an asshole like that, so I had been woken up about twenty minutes into what I'd thought would be a good night's sleep by the sound of John screaming something obscene repeatedly. I had cursed and fumbled for my phone, wondering why I hadn't changed his ring tone yet. There's a reason, I'm sure.

"John, what do you want?" I'd rasped into the phone.

"Dave, are you awake?" came John's excited voice, accompanied by a background of noise that indicated some sort of bar, or maybe a party.

I'd groaned. "As awake as I'm gonna be."

"Some homeless guy came in here twenty minutes ago and started rambling about slime appearing all over the vacant house he was sleeping in. Everyone else thinks he's high, but I'm thinking there may be something to this. Get your ass dressed and meet me at my place in twenty minutes."

I'd nodded, then when I remembered he couldn't see me I'd told him to make it twenty-five. We hung up and I spent the extra five minutes glaring at my ceiling.

* * *

Twenty-three minutes later I had pulled into John's apartment building, yawning and stumbling as I climbed out of my car. The fucker took his sweet time answering his door, dressed in a shirt advertising soy sauce that he probably thought was a hilarious inside joke and-

_I'm not going to ask when John got leather pants._

"I got the approximate address out of the guy," John had said as a greeting as he let me in. He walked over to his sofa and sat down, pants squeaking as he did up his shoes. My eyes had wandered over the items on the table in front of him, ignoring the empty video game cases and focusing on the things that could maybe be considered weapons if you stretched the definition of the word very tightly.

Or, you know, if you had similar hobbies to us.

"Do we know anything about whatever it is we're investigating?" I'd asked.

"Nah, just that there's been some sort of goop appearing everywhere in the house. Also some squatter died in the house, but he was eighty-two, so that might have been a coincidence."

I'd nodded, wincing when I saw that he'd moved and was pouring coffee into a beat-up thermos. We'd grabbed a couple weapons each, the bible bat and a crow bar and a squirt pistol full of a liquid that neither of us knew the origin of but that smoked and looked particularly menacing among them.

It had been a short drive to the general area described by the guy who was probably high on something whether or not his story was legitimate. After walking around in circles for far longer than my exhausted brain would have liked, we found ourselves in front of a house that could have been optimistically called a "fixer-upper." The door was unlocked, probably picked open at some point, so we had let ourselves in. I was glad I'd thought to grab the flashlight we keep in my car these days, since the lights in the mostly-bare front room didn't appear to work. It was a small house, thankfully, so it didn't take much exploring to figure out that, aside from a kitchen that miraculously did have a working light, albeit a very dim, occasionally flickering one, there was nothing significant to be found.

I turned to John and said, "So, what now?"

He had shrugged and then opened his mouth as if about to say something, but then his gaze focused in on something on the floor behind me. He didn't look scared so I didn't panic, but I did turn around rather quickly.

My first thought had been that somebody had vomited and tried to make the vomit into some kind of gelatin dessert, then given up half-way through. My second thought was that "slime" was a very kind description for whatever this was. My third thought was that it was coming from the pantry cabinet and growing very rapidly.

I had glanced back at John, then started to inch towards the pantry, trying not to step in the rapidly-growing puddle of gelatinous ooze that seemed determined to look as unappetizing as possible and failing miserably, feeling something soak through the bottoms of my worn-out sneakers. Lifting the crowbar with one hand, I used the other to fling open the cupboard.

It had not been the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. At this point in my life, a significant portion of the things I encounter when John and I somehow get roped into taking care of other people's unnatural problems are all tied for first on the list of the most disgusting things I've ever seen. This, though, was definitely joining the others in that crowded top tier.

It had been as gelatinous as the slime it had been oozing would lead you to suspect, though it was also pretty solid. It also hadn't appeared very large at first, though my opinion on that soon changed as it began... I'm not going to say oozing, since that's not quite right. As I backed away, it began unwinding, a steady stream of the thing coming apart and then back together and simultaneously expanding as it landed on the ground on its-

_Are those hooves?_

Something jammed into my arm, and I broke my gaze with the thing quickly coming out to see John trying to hand me his coffee thermos.

"Hold this for me," he had said. "I'll smash this motherfucker 'til it resembles the hole it crawled out of."

"John-" I had started to say, but my attention was drawn back when more of the creature's features revealed themselves.

_Why are there always tentacles?_

The hooved vomit octopus was starting to make a grumbling noise at that point, and the noise increased as John ran at it with the bible bat, smashing it as far into the thing as he could.

The bat got stuck in the vomit octopus, which seemed somehow unphased by the whole thing. In retaliation, one of the tentacles lifted and smacked him across the face, knocking him down, then advanced on me.

I had aimed with the crowbar for a spot that looked like it might have contained something vital, but either the walking puke didn't have vitals or I misjudged because it barely twitched as the crowbar penetrated it, and I quickly found myself with a tentacle wrapped around my throat for what I'm sad to say was not the first or even the third time. Its grip increased as it shoved me down and pinned me to the floor by the neck, and as I clawed at the thing I saw out of the corner of my eye that John, while not pinned by the throat, was wrestling with a tentacle over possession of the squirt gun.

Running out of air quickly and realizing that my stubby fingernails weren't going to dissuade it, I started groping around on the floor on either side of me, trying to find something, anything that could be used as a weapon. The knuckles of my left hand hit something hard that was trying to roll away, so I grabbed it and started trying to smash the damn tentacle. My vision had been getting a bit blurry as I whacked away uselessly when suddenly the lid of the thing I'd grabbed that I quickly began to realize was the coffee thermos broke off with a snap and there was black sludge everywhere. The vomitopus shrieked and to my surprise released me. I gulped down as much air as I could, then abruptly closed my mouth as tightly as possible as the damn thing started exploding and melting everywhere.

Somewhere in the chaos the question of whether John's coffee was just that poisonous or the thing was somehow weak against liquids had floated through my mind. This was probably answered when John, spurned on by the weakened tentacles, yanked the pistol free and started squirting the thing furiously with a loud battle cry, making it screech and melt even louder and faster.

_Next time John calls_, I thought, _I'm just going back to sleep. _Somewhere in the distance, I heard a clock strike midnight.

And so here I was, lying on the ground covered in the vital organs (and didn't that just answer the question of whether the thing had organs) of something that had looked even more disgusting while its insides were still inside it, trying not to breathe through my nose due to the sour smell while also trying not to breathe through my mouth due to the somehow less awful taste. I watched John perform some kind of victory dance that involved a lot of the type of movements that Elvis had been known for. I wondered vaguely if Elvis really was dead, knowing what I unfortunately know about the world. I decided after a few seconds that he probably was, just not for the reasons that had been officially reported. I probably should have gotten up, but there was the hint of an ache in my left knee from being yanked around by puke-colored tentacles that would no doubt become worse upon any attempt at movement that I didn't feel like dealing with just yet.

The only warning I got for what occurred next was the sound of something rustling to my right before the dim light that an inefficient light bulb on the ceiling was attempting to produce appeared to grow even dimmer as a shadow appeared overhead, and before I could do more than flinch there was something vaguely slimy and warm pressing roughly against my lips, moving with some kind of rhythm that could only barely actually be called a rhythm. This went on for a few seconds in which I tried to move my arms only to have my wrists grabbed and pinned lightly to the floor. Just as my slow brain finally caught on to the fact that the thing pressing against my lips was another pair of lips, the sensation got even slimier as what could only be a tongue made its way through the gap where my mouth was slightly opened in surprise. It was cooler than the lips, or maybe just cooler than the inside of my mouth, and I tasted sour alien innards, cinnamon gum, and the faint but no less horrid memory of John's coffee. The tongue felt its way around my mouth, rubbing itself against my tongue, stroking my teeth, tickling the roof of my mouth. These actions were repeated a few times as the lips continued to move, everything reconciling into a steadier rhythm than before. There was a roughness that only just began to make itself known through the fluids coating most of my body, and I quickly realized it was probably stubble.

About half a minute passed, then with one last lick the mouth retreated. I opened my eyes, wondering when I had closed them without noticing, and squinted up through the poor lighting at John's face. I blinked. He raised an eyebrow at me. I opened my mouth, closed it, thought about it, and opened it again.

"What-" I closed my mouth again, not sure what I wanted to ask.

John shrugged, and a sly smile made its way across his face.

"There weren't any chicks around," he said simply.

I considered this, then rolled my eyes and nodded. This wasn't even the weirdest thing he had done in post-dead-monster celebration. He let go of my wrists and stood up. He held out a hand towards me and I took it and stumbled to my feet, wincing as the suspected knee ache confirmed its existence in a very unpleasant way.

We looked at the mess of exploded tentacle beast around us, considered it, and simultaneously began to head for the door without bothering to clean up. I was exhausted and John was lazy, and it would still be there at a saner, more brightly lit time of day after we'd showered and recovered as much as possible.

We got to the doorway and John stopped and turned to me, smirking. I stopped and waited for whatever joke he was about to make at my expense.

"Besides, it looked like you were having a bad night. Also, you're gay."

I rolled my eyes again as we started walking, the beginnings of a smile working its way onto my face against my will. I got the feeling a heavily edited and widely exaggerated version of this story would eventually join the other humorous and equally as heavily edited and widely exaggerated stories that John told on a regular basis in an attempt to impress people, specifically women. Somehow, I didn't mind as much as I thought I would.


End file.
